Employee Spotlight: Sally Shi Dives Into the Data to Improve Decision Making

By May 31, 2022August 18th, 2022Life at Tideworks
Sally Shi

Sally Shi is Tideworks’ senior finance and accounting manager. Though she’s only been with the company for a short time, she’s already made major improvements to the decision-making process.

A Desire to Make a Difference

Sally joined Tideworks just over two years ago from the healthcare technology industry, where she worked in various aspects of accounting and finance. As a member of her company’s financial transformation team, she was instrumental in implementing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

Sally appreciated that opportunity to facilitate changes, but she wanted a more instrumental role. She wanted to work closely with the business instead of “sitting in the back office looking at the numbers.”

“When I saw Tideworks’ job post, I noticed you needed to be really engaged with the business, helping and driving business decisions,” Sally says. “I was very excited about that.”

Sally expressed her enthusiasm to her interviewer and soon landed the job. Now, she works on the finance team with her senior director, Glen, and senior accountant, Evan.

Focusing On What Matters

Greg Sharp, Tideworks’ COO, had a vision of transforming the financial system to be able to gather data based on business needs, enable quick financial analysis, and help the business to make decisions. To realize this vision, Greg and Sally embarked on a big project — the installation of an ERP system.

Soon after the project started, COVID hit. However, despite the unprecedented challenges due to the pandemic, turnover, and limited resources, Sally powered through the journey of the ERP implementation, knowing that broader, deeper, and more agile analysis was critical to the company’s ongoing financial health.

Building an ERP System

To build the department’s new system, they started by thinking about how their team could help Tideworks maintain financial stability. They considered organizational expenses, resource needs, and how needs vary across departments.

“The IFS implementation is a complete makeover,” Sally says, referring to Industrial and Financial Systems. “That is a huge upgrade…creating new data elements to capture new operations, locations, markets, products, revenue streams, and projects. Everything is redesigned to meet a business need.”

The IFS upgrade has helped Sally’s team get more value from the company’s financial data. Before the upgrade, analysis had to come from a lump sum figure that was difficult to deconstruct. Insights were limited, and it was challenging to get down to a practical level of detail.

The team has built a framework that lets them capture data at a granular level. It’s been “a massive effort from Sally’s team including Greg and Evan, and the Carrix’s IFS implementation team,” in Sally’s words, but it’s helped Tideworks stay financially solid in a time of industry disruption.

After IFS went live, Sally took a step further and led an effort to accelerate month-end close. Thanks to Sally, and Evan, they’ve shaved four days off their month-end close, giving them more time to analyze the numbers and collaborate with other business partners.

Now, Sally, Glen, and Evan are creating updated metrics based on newly available data. They work closely with stakeholders across the company to understand what those professionals need to know, perform more advanced forecasting and find the insights that help Tideworks improve financial performance.

“We ask the question: are those metrics still relevant? Are these numbers important to monitor? Our goal is to help the business prioritize,” explains Sally. For her, collaboration with Tideworks colleagues is one of the most rewarding parts of her job.

“I’m sitting in accounting and finance, a hub of all this information,” she shares. “It’s the only function in the company that can see every single thing in the business.”

Sally and her team routinely meet with colleagues to discuss the company’s financial priorities and how each department’s actions may impact its financial results. Using the numbers as a guide, Sally helps Tideworks employees make better choices — which, she says, is the most important part of her job.

“In accounting, even in the back office, every single function is to help the business perform,” she says. “Knowing that guides my actions.”
Tideworks team discussing at office

Looking to the Future

Sally’s work has already helped guide Tideworks through one of the most challenging periods in industry history. Tideworks is proud to remain a financially stable company. More importantly, it’s proud to offer customers the security of that stability.

But Sally’s work isn’t done. She and her team continue to build out the ERP system and dive more deeply into the data. Their goal is to uncover the critical metric — the business’s prime value driver. Knowing this, they can create a more effective and impactful system.

“We want to build a management system that can help businesses make decisions in a very efficient way,” she says. “A very mature system that can provide this ongoing feedback very quickly and accurately.”

Steer Into the Fear: Lessons from the Ski Slopes

Sally skiing
Guiding a company through an industry-wide crisis isn’t easy, but Sally is no stranger to challenges. She and her family are avid skiers, hitting the slopes every weekend during ski season. But Sally finds it very challenging.

She’s afraid of heights, but she’s also determined to learn. If something doesn’t go right, she goes back to the basics.

“Because I didn’t do the turn right, I couldn’t control my center of mass properly. I had to go back to the basic slope and practice.”

But even as she improved, Sally still felt afraid to look down the hill. It kept her from progressing — until she received sage advice from an experienced skier.

“I failed miserably one time,” she admits. “The guy who came and helped me said, ‘You really need to face your fear. Look down. Then you will do better.'”

Considering the Big Picture

Sally still remembers how much it helped to finally face her fears and look down the mountain. Suddenly, she could see the path ahead and what she needed to do. She applies this lesson every day at Tideworks.

With every report she sends, she looks at the bigger picture of how Tideworks operates. She asks herself if it will help the business make decisions. Will people see the information and use it to make the company stronger?

Sally is committed to sharing this big picture mindset as a manager. She believes that in her leadership role, she can help people understand how their actions affect business health.

“I think that even though people in the back-office support functions don’t face customers directly, they all have a role to play to help the business to perform better. Having that mindset will change what you do day-to-day.”
back office support

Eyes on the Prize: The Value of Knowing Your Industry

Looking forward is just part of the picture. As an accounting and finance professional, Sally also needs to look at the past and future. She needs to understand the industry, the economics that affects it, and how the business makes money.

Sally’s team pursues that knowledge continuously. They invite speakers to educate them about the industry, Tideworks customers, and what those customers need to succeed. They study the value chain around Tideworks and how that impacts the company’s all-important stability.

“Having that holistic information, knowing our competition, knowing our customer, that helps us to analyze the information [we have] and communicate it to other departments. That’s what we are continuously working on to get better.”

Growing Tideworks: Advice for Aspiring Colleagues

Sally believes there are two keys to success in working for Tideworks as a finance professional. The first is a thorough knowledge of accounting and finance. The second is a curious mind.

“Our mission is to help the business to make better decisions,” she says. “We need to be excited about taking on a bigger role…the appetite [to learn] the greater economics of our business.” By learning and collaborating with Tideworks outer operations, Sally has been able to help the company make better decisions.

Sally is grateful to be part of Tideworks and its friendly, inclusive team. She looks forward to learning more over the coming years — and Tideworks looks forward to having her.